Eastern Europe is a great destination for those on a budget. You can get there very cheaply on a budget flight, and once you get there you can eat, sleep and travel at a fraction of the cost of Western European destinations. But in these times of recession, some of us will want to know more than this: where are the cheapest places to stay within Eastern Europe? The web has previously lacked a visual guide to this question, so I decided to create one:
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The map is probably most useful when viewed on the Google Maps page — follow the above link to reach this. Destinations are colour-coded and numbered according to the typical price of dorm-style accommodation in that town. Lower numbers and green colours indicate lower prices; higher numbers and orange/red colours indicate higher prices. (The full key is on the Google Maps page.) This map documents all accommodation available for under around £25 per person per night, so all of the places listed here are cheap, by ordinary standards — this is a rating of just how cheap various destinations in Eastern Europe are. All data is taken from hostelworld.com. Below I’ll explain and justify the methodology; in a separate post I’ll analyse the results and talk about how best to use them.
Methodology
The “typical price” for each city was calculated using the following method. Firstly, I took the mean of the cheapest three dorm rooms available in that city. Then I took the mean of the three cheapest dorm rooms in hostels rated above 85% by customers on Hostelworld.com. The “typical price” is the mean of these two means. Some cities only have one or two places offering dorm-style accommodation; in those cases I’ve taken the mean of whatever was available. What’s more, some cities have no dorm-style accommodation at all. Hostelworld lists some guesthouse/B&B/hotel accommodation as well as hostels, so where there were no dorm rooms available I’ve taken the cheapest price for one person in a double room as the ‘typical price’. Cities where this was the case — cities with no dorm rooms — have been marked with an asterisk on the map. Once I had assembled all the ‘typical prices’, I split the cities into ten roughly equal groups, around some arbitrary boundaries, which correspond to the 1-10 ratings you see on the map.
Justifying the Methodology
Why take the mean of three prices from each city with multiple hostels? The alternative is obviously to list the cheapest room in each city. I preferred my approach because some cities have one hostel which is much cheaper than its competition. In those cases, the cheapest price should not be thought of as the “typical” price for that city. Hostels sometimes get full, or are sometimes unattractive for other reasons: a city should not be rated ’1′ on the basis of one very cheap hostel if the nearest competition costs substantially more. Because of this, I thought a mean of the cheapest few hostels was more useful.
Why take a second mean of hostels rating over 85%? It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but many of the better hostels tend to be a little more expensive. And many of us desire some level of comfort as well as rock-bottom prices. As such, I decided that the most useful “typical price” figure would contain not just the cheapest hostels, but also the cheapest very good hostels. A city shouldn’t get a ’1′-rating simply on the basis of a few very cheap but very bad hostels — better hostels should be taken into account, too, when calculating the “typical price”.
Clarifications and Disclaimers
Accommodation is not the only cost of travel, so there are other things to bear in mind when decided where your money will go furthest. But since accommodation is one of the biggest costs of any holiday, it’s useful to know where’s cheapest to sleep.
Quite obviously, prices and exchange rates are subject to quick and unpredictable change. The Hostelling world is very fluid — hostels come into and go out of existence very quickly — so this data will not remain super-accurate for very long. Nevertheless, I think it gives a useful but fallible picture of relative prices across Eastern Europe.
Not all accommodation is listed on Hostelworld.com. This will be especially the case for many guesthouses, campsites, etc, whose prices would be competitive with those listed on the map.
All searches were carried out for a bed in mid-August 2010.
The data spreadsheet used in making the map is here.
